Coo, this year's virus is a bugger isn't it. About a week of feeling mildly ill, then four days of feeling like absolute shite (though the first of those was possibly complicated by tequila slammers and whisky on quite a lot of wine and no more than nibbles the night before - and waking up in a house with no coffee, cigarettes, or breakfast) and now complete and utter exhaustion for three days so far. Am procrastinating about whether to cycle into work... probably a foolish idea as in my current state it will probably leave me sleeping all day in the armchair in my room, but the weather looks gorgeous...
100 Greatest Videos
Feb. 6th, 2005 10:40 pmThe man who directed the video for November Rain sounds refreshingly like Bill Bailey. But if I have to listen to bloody Sinead banging on about Nothing Compares 2 U once more in my entire life I shan't be answerable for the consequences.
Dalziel and Pascoe seems oddly inspired by the Lucan affair. Though it was Freddie Aspinall who had the private zoo (he being one of the people, along with Goldsmith, Rowland, et al, not to mention Marcia Falkender and Harold Wilson, that Richard Ingrams and the Private Eye team thought knew a great deal more about it than they were saying).
Yes, I am sitting around being bored and full of flu, why do you ask?
Van Helsing
Feb. 5th, 2005 11:35 pmHaving nothing better to do (cancelled party, nothing to hand I feel like reading, no energy to do anything and Saturday night TV is rubbish) I just sat here and watched the DVD of Van Helsing I picked up for a couple of quid in some sale or other. Rather to my surprise, I enjoyed it immensely. Admittedly this was through a haze of painkillers and whisky but surely no one ever thought this was supposed to be taken seriously? It's just a vast mishmash of in-jokes.
My shoulder's no better, and I now have a streaming cold, which makes me sneeze epically (is this a word, and if so, is it spelled like this?) every five minutes or so, thus causing spasms through the shoulder... I hate my life and everybody in it. Apart from the beautiful women obvs, but I have a nasty suspicion they're hallucinations.
So, today's hearing having ended early in a certain amount of hysteria (the reasons for the hysteria probably being comprehensible without detailed and lengthy explanation only to litigation-oriented lawyers, and I've been banging on about that side of my life too much lately), I decided to pootle off to UCH to see about fixing up some physio on my shoulder, courtesy of my GP's referral.
She'd given me a choice of UCH (which is fairly convenient for work) and the Royal Free (which is fairly convenient for home). Mindful of advice once given to me by a wise if flaky woman I opted for the teaching hospital...
Fourteen sodding weeks on the list. Balls to this (memo to self, must talk to health insurers tomorrow). So, thinking dire thoughts, I wandered down TCR to the tube station and slapped my Oyster card on the reader.
No response, and no response when doing so more carefully on other readers.
After some exploration, in the company of a friendly chap in the ticket office, it transpired that my Oyster card thought I had an "incomplete journey" (ie hadn't touched in) ending at Goodge St at... 2.30 AM.. (at which point the friendly ticket inspector's voice trailed away in embarrassment). It might have been more understandable if my journey starting at Goodge St last night (after an interminable lecture entitled "Law and Economics 20 years on", a worthy competitor for prizes in dullness, incomprehensibility, pointlessness and further dullness with its subject matter) and my journey ending at Goodge St that afternoon hadn't been otherwise accounted for on the record. The only possible explanation is that I've taken to exploring the tube network in my sleep. While no tubes are running. I shall take to wearing a "please look after this bear" label and would ask you all to be kind should you bump into me at Hounslow one night. At least this explains why I've been so tired recently.
Either that or Goodge St is some kind of temporal anomaly, but I refuse to make lame Hitchhikers references.
Rose tints my world, keeps me safe from my trouble and pain
(no points).
Undirected Rage
Nov. 18th, 2004 08:22 pmI have an absolute bugger of a headache behind my left eye (yes, I know I really ought to do something about the glasses I bust about five years ago), it's pissing with rain, and I'm in a very bad mood. I'm just not sure quite what to rant about. Or hit.
This'll do: Un-nameable sources say the issue fees for High Court Claims (and probably County Court claims as well I suspect) are set to at least double come January. To bring an action to recover, say, £20,000 the fee payable up front is likely to be over a grand possibly nearer two. Civil justice isn't a fundamental duty of a state, equal only to defence of the group and the person, any more you see, it's a business like any other that must pay its way. Excuse me while I go throw up.
(Edited to add: my choice of music to put me in a slightly better mood is Aqua's Aquarium. Does that make me a bad person?)
(Edited to further add: actually Mahler 2 is doing the job better)
Well, that was crappy
Apr. 5th, 2004 02:02 pmJust a week and a half ago, I think, I made that fatal mistake of consciously realising that I hadn't been properly ill, in the sense of not being able to leave my bed, for ages, indeed that for once in my life I seemed to have made it through an entire autumn and winter without any serious lergies.
To do so was, I now penitently realise, to invite the judgement of fate upon my head. To then go and spend an afternoon standing outside a pub in the cold and drizzle for the dubious pleasure of watching two minutes of a disappointing boat race was pure foolishness.
The worst thing was the timing couldn't have been worse: with Easter approaching everyone wants work finished before the holiday, so I had to at least show willing. Nor could I escape the long and fairly important meeting, in which a frank and fair exchange of views was always inevitable, on Wednesday evening, though I kept silent as my head took the express lift to the sixth circle of hell.
Actually, that was the worst of it: stayed in bed Thursday morning, went in to the office to deliver some work at lunchtime, and somehow managed to go for some mild drinking with Fairymelusine, over from NYC. I doubt I was much more spaced out and boring than usual. Took Friday working at home, which is actually becoming more possible to do regularly, and should be even more so once major technical problems are fixed. Sat I spent pottering about at home, save for a short expedition to give some chap some money on his promise that if a crappy nag in whom I had far too much confidence did inexplicably well he would give me lots more back, then went to Part II of a friend's stag night (Part I having been Budapest); and Sun I went to lunch with Fairymelusine again. All in all a fairly busy weekend considering how crappy I felt.
Now I just feel as though I ran a marathon yesterday evening. Bah humbug.
Glastonbury Tickets
Apr. 1st, 2004 08:58 pmIt took an hour of hitting reload on the website and redial on my phone simultaneously, but I should be the proud owner of one Glastonbury ticket.
Anyone still trying, try 01159934170, the secondary number, as well as the main one, and good luck.
I have been Horribly Ill, hence no recent updates.
Another Shitty Week
Mar. 21st, 2003 06:32 pmIt's been a long and shitty week.
Actually, from the work point of view, it's only been two days, but they've been a very long two days. The flu whatever has pretty much gone, but it has left behind near total exhaustion after about two hours work. Which doesn't really cut it when you're in your first year of practice as a barrister and trying desparately to get as many sets of papers through as possible.
Whatever. At least I've got the freedom to say soddit and go home when I want now, or just take the day off entirely. So long as I'm prepared not to earn any more money that day.
Plans for the weekend are a bit fluid. I really ought to go and see my parents, since I didn't get around to it last week, and I have a hankering to go to Oxford and see people I haven't for too long, but I'm also feeling a severe case of London Inertia. The feeling, that is, that London holds all that any mortal could possibly want, and making the effort to go and see those who for some strange reason deprive themselves of this is just too hard.
Plus, I have the excuse that if I don't I might get around to doing some work, both barrister and writing work that is. It's a blatant attempt to deceive myself of course, if I stay in London I shall quite probably do absolutely nothing all weekend, but if I'm not entitled to kid myself, who is?
Having a bit of a blue period about being 30, with a side order of skint and single (though the 30 bit is the real problem, frankly). Why it should come now, 6 months after the event, I'm not entirely sure.
I'm bored with being ill now.
To add insult to injury, I struggled into Chambers this morning to discover there was no work for me to do, no one had anything to offload on me, and no one much cared if I went home again. Which is what I intend to do.
Bank statement also arrived this morning. My finances, for many years an attempt at re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic into ever more complex forms, appear to have screwed up badly this month: I have something like 70 quid to make it to the end of the month, unless I turn to those fair weather friends, my credit cards. So I am going to have to talk to the bank manager, who always makes me depressed.
Spent yesterday lying around in Primrose Hill. Actually listened to most of the debate, at least in the background. Most impressive speech of the day was Hague's, surprisingly.
Incidentally, despite the fact I disagree with him and thought he was a shite Foreign Secretary (but a very good racing journalist), I also thought Cook's resignation was massively impressive.
I came round to supporting the war a long time ago, as most of you know: I'm not going to change my mind now, nor do I feel livejournal is a particularly good forum for examining it. Basically, it stems from the fact I'm a liberal interventionist by nature. Yes there are lots of places which could do with regime change in the world. Why this one, now? Why not, frankly. What matters now, I think, is what happens after, both in Iraq and elsewhere. I hope we are able to build a liberal democracy there: I don't think it is naive to think that is possible. I am also, quite emphatically, not a cultural relativist, and I don't buy the idea that somehow Arabs can't cope with (don't deserve?) western liberal democratic values. Perhaps, if we do succeed in that, we can also stop pretending the House of Saud are ok guys.
I'm tired, ill, poor and its sunny outside. Balls to this, I'm going home.
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